the 11" MBA has a smaller battery and still gets ~11 hours.
The 11" MBA also has inferior specs. The Surface pushes nearly twice as many pixels with a 1080p screen versus 768p. Surface also has a 1.6 GHz clock speed compared to 1.3 GHz for the MBA. Finally Surface has a touch screen and an active digitizer, which I assume must be drawing some power.
Calling a card that stores videos a "video card" at least makes sense for someone who doesn't know any better. Calling an engine a gas tank is just stupid as its neither tank-like nor where you pour in the gas.
This is the exact reason autonomous cars do not rely on GPS for navigation. Typical sensor suites for an autonomous car in addition to GPS include: Inertial Navigation System, high resolution odometry encoders, 2D lasers, 3D lasers, and 3D stereo vision. The data from all these sensors are fused together to create a high accurate (to within 10 centimeters in my experience) localization of the robot car.
Maybe you missed the "Pro" in "Surface Pro", but it's meant for a little more than posting pictures on Facebook. You're looking at one market that doesn't need the Surface Pro, and concluding there are no markets that need such a device. This is clearly fallacious.
You might be surprised, but a great deal of software designed for a class OS is usable one tablet, especially one with a stylus like the surface pro. Sure the experience is not optimized, but it does give you access to software you otherwise would not have. Photoshop is one of the best examples of an x86 application which is not designed for a tablet but works great with one.
Aside from software, x86 with Windows also gives you access to hardware you would otherwise be unable to use with an iPad or android device.
Before Surface I used to carry around a $900 ultrabook and a $500 iPad. After surface I carry around a single $900 device and it covers the functionality of both devices I used before for far less money, and at reduced size and weight. And the added pen functionality goes beyond anything the iPad was capable of. Do you refuse to recognize the utility of that?
I couldn't imagine attempting to lean back on the couch with a tablet and write code on a touch screen, it would be awful.
Of course this is an awful thought. Why would you even suggest this? No one here or anywhere has ever said Surface is good for programming on the touch screen. The idea is it's a tablet when you want a tablet and a laptop when you want a laptop.
Of course you can slap on the crap keyboard and sit down at a desk almost like it's a real computer... but then why don't you use a real laptop/desktop
Because when you leave the desk you can't take the desktop with you. And what do you mean a "real" laptop? Suface Pro is as capable as any laptop I've ever used. You say the keyboard is crap but the mechanical version more than sufficiently replaces my laptop's keyboard.
You say you want more than a tablet for mail/surfing.... Are you writing multipage emails on a tablet? What kind of surfing requires a full fledged OS?
The kind of surfing that involves flash. I can't watch hulu on my iPad, or any other flash dependent site. Or how about the kind of surfing that involves more than one page open at the same time. Surface can do this. iPad cannot. Or the kind of surfing where you download an arbitrary file and then work with it. A full OS can handle downloading anything. iPad cannot. Or in terms of emails, having an email open and a website or resource open next to it. iPad cannot do this.
Once you add a keyboard, you might as well just grab an ultraportable laptop (e.g. MB Air or Thinkpad X-series).
Why? Surface Pro is still price and spec competitve even with the keyboard accessory, is still thinner and lighter, and has a touch screen and active digitizer to boot.
Screen size, resolution, storage capactiy, storage speed, processor speed, active digitizer, RAM, x86 architecture are all advantages the Surface Pro has over the tablets you mentioned. The hardware is much more powerful and capable than pretty much any Android and iOS tablet out there. You get what you pay for holds in this context.
A season is a 1/4 trip around the sun. He got all the episodes available in that season. What he thought he was buying was Series 5 not season 5. Like how the british TV is named. If AMC had simply named them properly, Season 5 and seasons 6 or series 5 and series 6, rather than calling both season 5 there would be no ambiguity at all.
And if I were your customer and you said this to me, I wouldn't be your customer any longer. AMC has broken seasons in half before. With the Walking Dead seasons 2 and 3, they broke the season in two, with the first half airing Oct - Nov, and the second half airing Feb - March. If you bought the "season" pass in Oct, you got the episodes airing in March without having to pay again. Thus, anyone buying a season pass to Breaking Bad season 5 had every expectation that they would get the first half and second half, since the are all part of the same season. From the start, it was announced that Season 5 would be the last. Now all of a sudden they want to charge for a Season "6" or "5.5" to capitalize on the popularity of the show? Sorry, but customers see this bullshit money grab for what it is from a mile away. I for one bought season passes to Walking Dead and Breaking Bad for 8 total seasons. I won't be buying any more.
After formatting, the 32GB drive (decimal), the system has 29GB (binary) of usable space. 5GB is reserved for a recovery partition which can be removed, leaving you with 24GB before the OS. Windows RT + Apps + Office costs 8GB together, leaving you with 16GB at first boot. I'm not sure what Windows RT by itself costs.
I didn't say anything about my application? Why are you assuming I need a laptop? Does a laptop come with an active digitizer and touch screen? Does it weigh only 2 lbs? Is it only.5 inches thick? Let me clue you in, no. I need a light computer with touch and pen input and the ability to run x86 applications. Surface Pro and other similiar Windows Tablets are the only machines out there that offer this to me. Don't tell me what I need.
I want a _Surface_Tablet_ because _I_Need_Office_on_a_tablet_.
I want a _Surface_Table_ because _I_need_a_neat_keyboard_on_a_tablet_.
I want a _Surface_Table_ because _I_need_USB_Port_.
You missed a few of the marketing points:
I want a _Surface_Tablet_ because _I_Need_Performance_ -- Windows based tablets, from Microsoft or otherwise, come with vastly more powerful hardware compared to *any* Android or iOS based tablet. Aside from the obvious i5, Windows based tablets typically come paired with a full SSD instead of cheap eMMC storage. For anyone who doesn't understand what this means, typically you'll see 10x better transfer rates on the Surface Pro compared to a tablet like the 4th gen iPad.
I want a _Surface_Tablet_ because _I_Need_An_Active_Digitizer_ -- Almost all x86 Windows tablets come with an active digitizer, and so do many ARM based tablets. Apple offers exactly zero options for this, and the options on Android are few and far between. Also, Android cannot compete with Microsoft's handwriting recognition software, as it's easily best in the industry and probably won't be beat in a long time (I'm familiar with the machine learning approaches they are using). Windwos also has the software to match which is adequate for professional artists and yes, usable in tablet mode despite being x86 applications.
I want a _Surface_Table_ because _I_need_Ports_ -- Not just a USB port, but HDMI, full size USB 3, SD, and sometimes all three at the same time. A dongle system like the iPad has doesn't work for me. Some Android tablets have these features, but what's even more important is what the OS can handle with them. Surface turns into a full desktop system with full desktop apps and a full desktop OS when plugged in to KVM. Android tablets remain primarily touch-based shoehorned with some keyboard and mouse functionality.
I won't go there, but I will note that we are nearing a point where robots in a factory could build new robots with little or no human assistance. (See car factories for an example).
This is semi-true. You're forgetting about how the factory robots got there in the first place. This is a major design and engineering job, from building the robots, to programming them, to servicing them, to designing the production line, the tooling, to calibrating the machines, to monitoring their operatinon. As automated as the process has become, there are still scores of humans involved in making it happen at varying levels of technical ability.
That could be the real challenge... what are we going to do when it's not economical for a human to do ANY busy work. Even the not-so-bright need something to do.
I'm not sure that future will ever exist. Look at the automobile. It may have killed the horse and buggy industry, but the autmotoive industry and all associated industries (gas stations, parts stores, mechanics) were much larger. Sure not everyone displaced by a robot can become a robotics engineer, but robots need servicing and it doesn't take a roboticist to do that. As a robotics engineer myself, I can confidently say we are nowhere near the point where robots will be servicing themselves, so don't even go there.
I'm a robotics engineer. For me, it's creating jobs.
Re:What's good for others apparently is no good fo
on
Break Microsoft Up
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· Score: 1
Microsoft didn't do the innovating part. They did the packaging.
And what exactly was the innovating part? Again, you haven't told us what "innovating" is in your eyes. You've given plenty of negative examples, but no positive ones. In the case of the kinect, the "packaging" is not just taking a sensor and slapping a MS logo on it and calling it a day. Is that really all you think it was?
Re:What's good for others apparently is no good fo
on
Break Microsoft Up
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· Score: 1
I'm not being pedantic, you're just being arbitrary. You've decided innovative == built in house from scratch, for some unspecified value of scratch. Point me to any product you deem innovative and I'll tell you how it wasn't built in house from scratch and how the company didn't build it. Again Android, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Google Glass... some products constantly being lauded for innovation, all built using outside parts, sensors, and technologies.
The Zune was a "me too" product which apparently 'squirted' and nobody bought. Their tablets and phones, just more "me too" and the market doesn't seem interested.
You seem to now be conflating "innovation" with "market success" which are completely different. You call Microsoft tablet's me too, but Microsoft has been in the tablet business longer than Apple and Google. They weren't market successes, but they were innovative in their own right and first of their kind. Even today Microsoft has the best handwriting recognition support of any tablet out there.
I'm not saying you need to create every single piece of technology from scratch without relying on anything before. I'm saying they haven't strung together existing bits of technology to create anything which is novel or innovative in a very long time.
If you're not saying that, then why did you say this: "They couldn't make their own motion controller work, so they bought one and integrated that with XBox, but they didn't build it."
The kinect is exactly an example of the kind of innovation you're looking for, but somehow it "doesn't count" in your eyes. Why?
Re:What's good for others apparently is no good fo
on
Break Microsoft Up
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· Score: 1
Right so the iPod was a clever assembly of things and designed in house, but the Kinect was bought outright, slapped with a MS sticker, and sold to consumers. Sorry, Microsoft bought the sensors for the kinect just as Apple bought the multi-touch screen for the iPhone. It's a sensor, nothing more. Same as any gyroscope. They only reason you think it's a "key technology" is because you never saw it before the kinect, but the technology and theory behind the kinect's sensor is old and nothing special. It's just never been used in a mass market application. No, the innovation of the kinect is not the sensor but the whole package. If you can't see how the iPod and Kinect are the same in that regard, your blinders are on.
Re:What's good for others apparently is no good fo
on
Break Microsoft Up
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Kinect was a complete technology even before they bought it
No it was not. Primesense had a sensor and some algorithms in a consumer and developer unfriendly package. The sensor wasn't a new idea -- structured light has been around for decades The algorithms weren't a new -- the CV algorithms to process the data have been around for decades. Microsoft took these ideas and went the last mile of making it a reality for consumers and developers, which obviously is not easy since no one had done it before.
Microsoft buying the Primesense sensor and using it in their product is equivalent to Apple buying a multi-touch screen and using it in the iPhone. But no one is saying the iPhone wasn't an innovation.
Again, if you're arguing that very little actual innovation takes place, you will see a great deal of agreement.
No, I'm arguing that innovation is almost never the sudden development of a new and radical technology from scratch, but almost always the application or combination of existing technology in new ways. Even look at the Internet, the greatest innovation of our generation, It didn't happen over night, built by one company or entity from scratch; it was an evolution of technologies over 20 or so years.
[T]he Kinect is not innovative, it's just better than other similar things which came before
Really? Something comes out which is better than everything before it and that's not an innovation? What exactly is *your* idea of an innovation. You've told us plenty about what isn't an innovation, but I don't really see any indication from you about what *is* an innovation.
Re:What's good for others apparently is no good fo
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Break Microsoft Up
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· Score: 4, Insightful
In terms of their own creation of products from scratch
That's a pretty high bar you've set. It seems like for you, to qualify as an innovation you have to single handedly build every component within the device at the company internally from first principles (aka "scratch"). The Kinect was as much an innovation as the iPod... it was an evolution of technology, built on existing technology but packaged in a way that brought widespread consumer adoption.
Can you point to any device from any company that is built fully in-house from scratch? Just looking at the companies listed by TFA as innovative, I can't think of one. Amazon's Kindle Fire? Built on top of Android and chasing the sucess of the iPad. Google's Android? Bought. Google's self driving car? They bought the talent from the DARPA challenges. Google Glass? Under the same principles you will not call the Kinect innovative Google Glass is not innovative - built on the technology others have created. What about the original iPad? Every piece of functioning technolgoy within was purchased from another company. So maybe the OS is all in-house.... but iOS is based on OSX which is based on BSD, so I guess they call short of your bar as well.
Sorry, ALL technology today is built off the technology others have created. The Kinect used Primesense's sensor to create an innovative gaming device the same way the iPad used someone elses's touch screen technology to create an innovative tablet. Give credit where it is due.
1. I can turn it off and then how do I do anything? There is no other method.
You can access charm functionality with keyboard shortcuts if you want. You just said you don't want corners, and you can turn it off. Problem solved.
2. That is two applications. I currently while typing, have 5 applications open. This can't be done.
You can have up to 4 depending on resolution and monitor size. Or N many if you want one of them to be the desktop. Windows 8 is a super set of Windows 7 in this regard. I'm on Windows 8 and currently have 10 applications running. Wow!
I don't want to run in a browser, I want the native app. You are offering workarounds for an unusable desktop OS
How do you run netflix in Windows 7? Oh right, you run it in the browser. If you want the native app, you run it snapped. It works just fine.
You prove my point exactly. In all case, it is worse that 7.
In all cases it works at least the same as Windows 7. There is no app stores or apps in Windows 7, so how is the way they run in Windows 8 in any way worse than in Windows 7?
Slashdot Mirror
the 11" MBA has a smaller battery and still gets ~11 hours.
The 11" MBA also has inferior specs. The Surface pushes nearly twice as many pixels with a 1080p screen versus 768p. Surface also has a 1.6 GHz clock speed compared to 1.3 GHz for the MBA. Finally Surface has a touch screen and an active digitizer, which I assume must be drawing some power.
Calling a card that stores videos a "video card" at least makes sense for someone who doesn't know any better. Calling an engine a gas tank is just stupid as its neither tank-like nor where you pour in the gas.
This is the exact reason autonomous cars do not rely on GPS for navigation. Typical sensor suites for an autonomous car in addition to GPS include: Inertial Navigation System, high resolution odometry encoders, 2D lasers, 3D lasers, and 3D stereo vision. The data from all these sensors are fused together to create a high accurate (to within 10 centimeters in my experience) localization of the robot car.
Maybe you missed the "Pro" in "Surface Pro", but it's meant for a little more than posting pictures on Facebook. You're looking at one market that doesn't need the Surface Pro, and concluding there are no markets that need such a device. This is clearly fallacious.
You might be surprised, but a great deal of software designed for a class OS is usable one tablet, especially one with a stylus like the surface pro. Sure the experience is not optimized, but it does give you access to software you otherwise would not have. Photoshop is one of the best examples of an x86 application which is not designed for a tablet but works great with one.
Aside from software, x86 with Windows also gives you access to hardware you would otherwise be unable to use with an iPad or android device.
Battery life for the original surface pro was on par with the MacBook air at the time at 5 hours. The revamp looks to target 8 hours.
For anyone who has used OneNote, the versions on iOS and Android are OneNote Lite.
I couldn't imagine attempting to lean back on the couch with a tablet and write code on a touch screen, it would be awful.
Of course this is an awful thought. Why would you even suggest this? No one here or anywhere has ever said Surface is good for programming on the touch screen. The idea is it's a tablet when you want a tablet and a laptop when you want a laptop.
Of course you can slap on the crap keyboard and sit down at a desk almost like it's a real computer... but then why don't you use a real laptop/desktop
Because when you leave the desk you can't take the desktop with you. And what do you mean a "real" laptop? Suface Pro is as capable as any laptop I've ever used. You say the keyboard is crap but the mechanical version more than sufficiently replaces my laptop's keyboard.
You say you want more than a tablet for mail/surfing.... Are you writing multipage emails on a tablet? What kind of surfing requires a full fledged OS?
The kind of surfing that involves flash. I can't watch hulu on my iPad, or any other flash dependent site. Or how about the kind of surfing that involves more than one page open at the same time. Surface can do this. iPad cannot. Or the kind of surfing where you download an arbitrary file and then work with it. A full OS can handle downloading anything. iPad cannot. Or in terms of emails, having an email open and a website or resource open next to it. iPad cannot do this.
Once you add a keyboard, you might as well just grab an ultraportable laptop (e.g. MB Air or Thinkpad X-series).
Why? Surface Pro is still price and spec competitve even with the keyboard accessory, is still thinner and lighter, and has a touch screen and active digitizer to boot.
Screen size, resolution, storage capactiy, storage speed, processor speed, active digitizer, RAM, x86 architecture are all advantages the Surface Pro has over the tablets you mentioned. The hardware is much more powerful and capable than pretty much any Android and iOS tablet out there. You get what you pay for holds in this context.
Huh, so I was right. Assholes who drive like you really do think they're above the law and better than everyone else.
A season is a 1/4 trip around the sun. He got all the episodes available in that season. What he thought he was buying was Series 5 not season 5. Like how the british TV is named. If AMC had simply named them properly, Season 5 and seasons 6 or series 5 and series 6, rather than calling both season 5 there would be no ambiguity at all.
And if I were your customer and you said this to me, I wouldn't be your customer any longer. AMC has broken seasons in half before. With the Walking Dead seasons 2 and 3, they broke the season in two, with the first half airing Oct - Nov, and the second half airing Feb - March. If you bought the "season" pass in Oct, you got the episodes airing in March without having to pay again. Thus, anyone buying a season pass to Breaking Bad season 5 had every expectation that they would get the first half and second half, since the are all part of the same season. From the start, it was announced that Season 5 would be the last. Now all of a sudden they want to charge for a Season "6" or "5.5" to capitalize on the popularity of the show? Sorry, but customers see this bullshit money grab for what it is from a mile away. I for one bought season passes to Walking Dead and Breaking Bad for 8 total seasons. I won't be buying any more.
After formatting, the 32GB drive (decimal), the system has 29GB (binary) of usable space. 5GB is reserved for a recovery partition which can be removed, leaving you with 24GB before the OS. Windows RT + Apps + Office costs 8GB together, leaving you with 16GB at first boot. I'm not sure what Windows RT by itself costs.
I didn't say anything about my application? Why are you assuming I need a laptop? Does a laptop come with an active digitizer and touch screen? Does it weigh only 2 lbs? Is it only .5 inches thick? Let me clue you in, no. I need a light computer with touch and pen input and the ability to run x86 applications. Surface Pro and other similiar Windows Tablets are the only machines out there that offer this to me. Don't tell me what I need.
I want a _Surface_Tablet_ because _I_Need_Office_on_a_tablet_. I want a _Surface_Table_ because _I_need_a_neat_keyboard_on_a_tablet_. I want a _Surface_Table_ because _I_need_USB_Port_.
You missed a few of the marketing points:
I want a _Surface_Tablet_ because _I_Need_Performance_ -- Windows based tablets, from Microsoft or otherwise, come with vastly more powerful hardware compared to *any* Android or iOS based tablet. Aside from the obvious i5, Windows based tablets typically come paired with a full SSD instead of cheap eMMC storage. For anyone who doesn't understand what this means, typically you'll see 10x better transfer rates on the Surface Pro compared to a tablet like the 4th gen iPad.
I want a _Surface_Tablet_ because _I_Need_An_Active_Digitizer_ -- Almost all x86 Windows tablets come with an active digitizer, and so do many ARM based tablets. Apple offers exactly zero options for this, and the options on Android are few and far between. Also, Android cannot compete with Microsoft's handwriting recognition software, as it's easily best in the industry and probably won't be beat in a long time (I'm familiar with the machine learning approaches they are using). Windwos also has the software to match which is adequate for professional artists and yes, usable in tablet mode despite being x86 applications.
I want a _Surface_Table_ because _I_need_Ports_ -- Not just a USB port, but HDMI, full size USB 3, SD, and sometimes all three at the same time. A dongle system like the iPad has doesn't work for me. Some Android tablets have these features, but what's even more important is what the OS can handle with them. Surface turns into a full desktop system with full desktop apps and a full desktop OS when plugged in to KVM. Android tablets remain primarily touch-based shoehorned with some keyboard and mouse functionality.
I won't go there, but I will note that we are nearing a point where robots in a factory could build new robots with little or no human assistance. (See car factories for an example).
This is semi-true. You're forgetting about how the factory robots got there in the first place. This is a major design and engineering job, from building the robots, to programming them, to servicing them, to designing the production line, the tooling, to calibrating the machines, to monitoring their operatinon. As automated as the process has become, there are still scores of humans involved in making it happen at varying levels of technical ability.
That could be the real challenge... what are we going to do when it's not economical for a human to do ANY busy work. Even the not-so-bright need something to do.
I'm not sure that future will ever exist. Look at the automobile. It may have killed the horse and buggy industry, but the autmotoive industry and all associated industries (gas stations, parts stores, mechanics) were much larger. Sure not everyone displaced by a robot can become a robotics engineer, but robots need servicing and it doesn't take a roboticist to do that. As a robotics engineer myself, I can confidently say we are nowhere near the point where robots will be servicing themselves, so don't even go there.
I'm a robotics engineer. For me, it's creating jobs.
Microsoft didn't do the innovating part. They did the packaging.
And what exactly was the innovating part? Again, you haven't told us what "innovating" is in your eyes. You've given plenty of negative examples, but no positive ones. In the case of the kinect, the "packaging" is not just taking a sensor and slapping a MS logo on it and calling it a day. Is that really all you think it was?
The Zune was a "me too" product which apparently 'squirted' and nobody bought. Their tablets and phones, just more "me too" and the market doesn't seem interested.
You seem to now be conflating "innovation" with "market success" which are completely different. You call Microsoft tablet's me too, but Microsoft has been in the tablet business longer than Apple and Google. They weren't market successes, but they were innovative in their own right and first of their kind. Even today Microsoft has the best handwriting recognition support of any tablet out there.
I'm not saying you need to create every single piece of technology from scratch without relying on anything before. I'm saying they haven't strung together existing bits of technology to create anything which is novel or innovative in a very long time.
If you're not saying that, then why did you say this: "They couldn't make their own motion controller work, so they bought one and integrated that with XBox, but they didn't build it."
The kinect is exactly an example of the kind of innovation you're looking for, but somehow it "doesn't count" in your eyes. Why?
Right so the iPod was a clever assembly of things and designed in house, but the Kinect was bought outright, slapped with a MS sticker, and sold to consumers. Sorry, Microsoft bought the sensors for the kinect just as Apple bought the multi-touch screen for the iPhone. It's a sensor, nothing more. Same as any gyroscope. They only reason you think it's a "key technology" is because you never saw it before the kinect, but the technology and theory behind the kinect's sensor is old and nothing special. It's just never been used in a mass market application. No, the innovation of the kinect is not the sensor but the whole package. If you can't see how the iPod and Kinect are the same in that regard, your blinders are on.
Kinect was a complete technology even before they bought it
No it was not. Primesense had a sensor and some algorithms in a consumer and developer unfriendly package. The sensor wasn't a new idea -- structured light has been around for decades The algorithms weren't a new -- the CV algorithms to process the data have been around for decades. Microsoft took these ideas and went the last mile of making it a reality for consumers and developers, which obviously is not easy since no one had done it before.
Microsoft buying the Primesense sensor and using it in their product is equivalent to Apple buying a multi-touch screen and using it in the iPhone. But no one is saying the iPhone wasn't an innovation.
Again, if you're arguing that very little actual innovation takes place, you will see a great deal of agreement.
No, I'm arguing that innovation is almost never the sudden development of a new and radical technology from scratch, but almost always the application or combination of existing technology in new ways. Even look at the Internet, the greatest innovation of our generation, It didn't happen over night, built by one company or entity from scratch; it was an evolution of technologies over 20 or so years.
[T]he Kinect is not innovative, it's just better than other similar things which came before
Really? Something comes out which is better than everything before it and that's not an innovation? What exactly is *your* idea of an innovation. You've told us plenty about what isn't an innovation, but I don't really see any indication from you about what *is* an innovation.
In terms of their own creation of products from scratch
That's a pretty high bar you've set. It seems like for you, to qualify as an innovation you have to single handedly build every component within the device at the company internally from first principles (aka "scratch"). The Kinect was as much an innovation as the iPod... it was an evolution of technology, built on existing technology but packaged in a way that brought widespread consumer adoption.
Can you point to any device from any company that is built fully in-house from scratch? Just looking at the companies listed by TFA as innovative, I can't think of one. Amazon's Kindle Fire? Built on top of Android and chasing the sucess of the iPad. Google's Android? Bought. Google's self driving car? They bought the talent from the DARPA challenges. Google Glass? Under the same principles you will not call the Kinect innovative Google Glass is not innovative - built on the technology others have created. What about the original iPad? Every piece of functioning technolgoy within was purchased from another company. So maybe the OS is all in-house.... but iOS is based on OSX which is based on BSD, so I guess they call short of your bar as well.
Sorry, ALL technology today is built off the technology others have created. The Kinect used Primesense's sensor to create an innovative gaming device the same way the iPad used someone elses's touch screen technology to create an innovative tablet. Give credit where it is due.
You can already opt out on 8.1: http://i.imgur.com/UY2RgUo.png
1. I can turn it off and then how do I do anything? There is no other method.
You can access charm functionality with keyboard shortcuts if you want. You just said you don't want corners, and you can turn it off. Problem solved.
2. That is two applications. I currently while typing, have 5 applications open. This can't be done.
You can have up to 4 depending on resolution and monitor size. Or N many if you want one of them to be the desktop. Windows 8 is a super set of Windows 7 in this regard. I'm on Windows 8 and currently have 10 applications running. Wow!
I don't want to run in a browser, I want the native app. You are offering workarounds for an unusable desktop OS
How do you run netflix in Windows 7? Oh right, you run it in the browser. If you want the native app, you run it snapped. It works just fine.
You prove my point exactly. In all case, it is worse that 7.
In all cases it works at least the same as Windows 7. There is no app stores or apps in Windows 7, so how is the way they run in Windows 8 in any way worse than in Windows 7?